The weekend I broke up with 75% of my sheet masks

Monday, 4 January 2016

This weekend is going to be a light-hearted progress report and not an in-depth review, guide, or discussion, so if you're not particularly interested in how I attacked the contents of my sheet mask stash and culled the weak from the herd, check in next weekend when we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming!

I poured myself a coffee, hauled my sheet masks out of every nook and cranny of the house, & prepared to be savage.

I had no intention of blogging this weekend; every once of mental fortitude was already spoken for this arduous task ahead of me. So how did I end up breaking up with the majority of my sheet masks, and then staying up late posting about it?!

In this post:

What possessed me to do this in the first place

What I'm excited to use

What I'm excited to try

What I'm keeping, but not using, & what I'll be using up

What's being given the boot- gifted, given away, and destashed

What my mask collection looks like in the aftermath

There may be a few expired masks in the 'destined for destash' pile, so I'll be sorting through when I decide what to do with them, but it's such a relief to have culled so much from my stash. Life is too short to be wasted on masks I don't want to use!

What possessed me to do this in the first place?

I work from home, and due to some unfortunate circumstances surrounding our move, I ended up having to go back to work before having the chance to unpack, let alone put away, all things that had been crammed into my office as our movers finally unloaded our worldly possessions.

That means I've been working wedged between boxes, tripping over plastic bins, weaving in between stackable drawers, and generally going insane due to the mess, since August. Trying to find and organize all of my product stash in the obstacle course that is my office, then trying to take blog photos while being wound around things like an overly-amorous snake. Nope.

So after 4 months of procrastination and overly long work days that left me exhausted on weekdays and double-booked on the weekends, I set to finally unpacking, storing, and stacking the horde (and hoard) in my office. Amazingly, I was so refreshed and energized by having a clean, emptied room that I found myself looking around for other tasks that I'd been unable to make progress on.

I spied the recently-delivered care packages from fellow Snailcaster Tracy of Fanserviced, which I had had no room to unpack ... until now. I shall be guilty no more! It's time to unpack, inventory, and schedule these for testing, so that all her hard work and generosity does not go to waste!

This also reminds me that I'm like 4 months behind on sending her my care packages. That will be next weekend's task.

Now, Tracy is a fan of the Komari Method, which I admit I have not yet fully researched, but it seems to dovetail really nicely with some of the philosophies that I've been talking about lately myself:

Once you've taken stock of what you have, and you're feeling burdened, stressed, or alarmed about what you have, it's ok to put aside some things that you've got negative or ambivalent feelings about, and focus on organizing things that you're excited or happy about. (From: Beginner's Dilemma: Getting Organized & In Control of Your Stash)

Between her ongoing mentions of how she uses Konmari to rid herself of things that give her negative feelings- letting her focus on what genuinely excites her- and seeing this influx of sample testers from her, I was ready to practice what I'd been preaching and cull my sheet mask stash. I've actually been using sheet masks less than usual lately, mostly because I kept trying to guilt myself into using the ones that I wasn't happy with and thus avoided using one at all.

I have a lot of sheet masks, but I only actually want to use around 20% of them, and when I find myself rebuying specific masks rather than have to use the rest of my stash, I know I need to take myself to Snesus.

I just need to come to terms with the fact that Mediental, Evercos, and silk masks have ruined me forever, and that I just can't go back to regular masks. Even if they have cute prints on them.

What I'm excited to use

Just like I mentioned above, I'm really only excited to use about 20% of my stash, and as it happens, I was pretty close with that number. The actual number (give or take a few masks) is 23.52%, and yes, I really love spreadsheets. Imagine that, over 75% of my masks are in the "meh" category. What if I gave myself permission to let go of all the masks that are perfectly fine, perfectly usable, but just aren't to my tastes? This is what remains:

All 20 types of my 'top tier' masks. Mask rating: Get On Me.

This might look like a lot, but as someone who had 211 masks once I unboxed the care packages, this is a pretty restrained amount. You'll also notice there are entire boxes of some of them- at least I have the good sense not to buy large amounts of unknown masks- these are all ones that I've repurchased multiple times and they're all my 'top tier' masks which I actively want on my face.

If you want to see what these are, just take a gander at my spreadsheet; they're all listed there. Spoilers: lots of my Best of 2015 masks, which I am sure is no surprise, really.

What I'm excited to try

Some of these are gifts, some random gifts-with-purchase, and most I purchased myself, but they're all things I'm curious to try. I tend to purchase unknown masks 2 at a time, so I'm not investing too much if I hate them, but still have a second to backup my first impression, if needed.

It's amazing how much sheet masks will slide around.

That's it, that's my entire backlog of sheet masks pending testing. If you take that in context of a 200+ mask stash, that's pretty streamlined. Since I normally use masks daily (or even twice a day) I should be able to make my way through these pretty quickly, although the Japanese masks on the far left technically should have been in this next category.

What I'm keeping, but not using, & what I'll be using up

There are a few masks that I'm not really interested in using on my face, but I will be using them for examples of things, such as good packaging or the final 'flavour' in a line of masks I otherwise enjoyed. There are also some masks that I'm not excited to use, but that I like enough to keep them on the chance that I am in the mood to use one, or that I want to use as gifts.

On the left: masks I want to keep as examples. On the right: things I can see myself using when the mood strikes.

You'll notice that this grouping includes some animal masks and an Evercos mask (White Poria), which might be shocking considering that Evercos are my favourite all-around masks (see more at 2015 in Review, Part I: My Favourite K-Beauty Products of 2015) but I actually don't care for this 'flavour' despite loving Evercos masks in general. The scent is too intensely floral, so I'm keeping one for photos of the 'set' and destashing the rest. I am sure someone else will love them.

What's being given the boot- gifted, given away, and destashed

You'll see the rest of the Evercos White Poria masks are here, along with the rest of the SNP Dragon animal masks. So are a lot of the masks I've used and liked well enough before, but now I just find I don't need or want anymore. So what happened to change my mind?

What changed was the masks I could get for the same price. I was discussing this post, and my destash list, with fellow Snailcaster Fiddy of Fifty Shades of Snail, and she nailed it:

I think I was more open to cheap and not totally awesome masks before finding the wonders of inexpensive Taiwanese silk masks.

This is it, right here. I don't hate most of these masks (ok, "wet t-shirt of doom wrapped around my face and trying to kill me" Scinic masks notwithstanding) and many of them were good value for their purpose, which was to be an 'everyday' mask that wouldn't bankrupt me to use 1-2 times daily.

As a quick reminder: Check your masks for their expiry date! Expiry date is "까지" and "제조" is date of manufacture, so double check! Sadly, some masks were expired and had to be chucked out, but ironically, only 2 masks expired under my 'watch'; the rest were expired when I received them. That's pretty impressive considering the relative size of my mask stash!

What my mask collection looks like in the aftermath

Here's the end result:

The contents in the blue tub are mask packs, hair masks,spot treatments like hydrocolloid bandages, etc

Man that feels good. I no longer feel trepidation or guilt when facing the prospect of opening my sheet mask drawer and having to dig through all the things I should be using, but don't want to. I'm going to celebrate this extremely productive weekend and unexpected bonus post with (what else) a sheet mask to relax before bed.

It feels so great to know I could shove my hand into this drawer and fish out something I'd be glad to see, and wear. Success!

Have you Konmari'd your collection, or have one that you need cheering on to deal with? Hit me up on Facebook or Twitter and let me know, or even better- snap a pic and tag me on Instagram at @snowwhiteandtheasianpear because I'd love to see it!

All the best,

-Cat

**Disclaimer: All products reviewed/mentioned in my blog, are 100% purchased with my own money, with a single exception of a press sample I reviewed in 2015 which swore me off of them forever. This blog contains both affiliate and non-affiliate links, and clicking the former before you shop means that this blog may receive a small commission to assist in this blog supporting itself. Please see my Contact Info & Disclaimer policy for more information.

Wow that's indeed a huge stock !Bravo for getting it stashed and organized :) I totally agree to focus on the thing you love and that excites you and let go on the others.

I remember getting a whole stock of innisfree masks during sales and then discovered that i'm actually sensitive to alcohol (ayah i was very newbie about ingredient awareness back then) so end up giving like 75% of them away to friends and family (good thing that my family are into sheet masks :D)At least they are not wasted :)

is "Konmari" a word now? LOL But I have put my stash into my organizer/shelf. I don't have a spread sheet because I just do like them (I'm more of a form kind of gal). I need to do some more organizing and getting rid of stuff.